By I bet you thought that Kevin Feige, as the head of Marvel’s movie studios, was pretty damn powerful. Well, not powerful enough. He use to report to the CEO of Marvel, Ike Perlmutter, but no more! In a big shake up Feige will be reporting directly to Disney, who bought Marvel a few years ago, studio chief Alan Horn.
Why do you care who he reports to as long as he keeps making awesome Marvel universe movies? Because Perlmutter is a notoriously recluse CEO who has a penchant for avoiding risk at all costs and pinching pennies. Perlmutter almost derailed Captain America: Civil War because he didn’t want to pay Robert Downey Jr. to co-star. He was also against striking a deal with Sony to get Spider-Man into the MCU. Feige has been reportedly frustrated with being denied and re-routed numerous times over where he’d like to take the universe and this move basically frees him up to do whatever the hell he wants.
Now, we probably will never know the changes that occur. Phase III of the universe has been locked in already so that means anything that’s new would come in Phase IV, and we know nothing about Phase IV yet. My hope is that this means that we’ll finally get another stand alone Hulk since the ownership issues can all be ironed out with a hopefully willing to talk Feige.
Also interesting is that Perlmutter will still be overseeing everything else that is Marvel, and that means television too. Seems odd that since the universe crosses over both that movies would be moved away, but the television series have always felt like (awesome) also-rans. Hopefully this doesn’t make the divide even worse.
[via THR]